Letters from Rona / Women / Sort by date

Soon after the Montreal Massacre, Flare magazine asked me for an essay on its meaning to women. There were many who dismissed the lethal shooting spree as the act of a madman. I saw it as the far extreme of attitudes that threaten women in their own neighbourhoods and bedrooms. Yes, even women like me. I didn't want to think about that, but I've learned that the stories I most resist are the ones I most need to tell. [more]

In the December issue of Vogue, a magazine I rarely buy but this month couldn't resist, Hillary Clinton is profiled by Jonathan Van Meter, who closes his eye-opening interview with this question: why is she such an inspiration to women when Margaret Thatcher, who reached greater heights, was rarely described in those terms? [more]

In 1976, when we still believed in "having it all" and "glass ceiling" was a skylight with pretensions, I landed my first magazine job. Career gurus told me I should learn to act more like men. These days it's career-minded men who are being told to emulate women. So says Men's Health, the modern guy's mentor on every aspect of manhood from getting laid to getting ahead. [more]

There's a depth of desire---fierce, wholehearted and relentless---that can seize the heart of a teenage girl and carry her away, perhaps forever. Some girls are so determined to be thin that they'll starve for their notion of beauty. Others have staked their sense of self on joining violent gangs where rape is the price of admission. Laura Dekker, 14, is raising teen obsession to a loftier plane. She intends to become the youngest person to sail around the world solo. [more]

Although I'm not among those who feel personally stricken by the death of Gourmet magazine after 68 years, I've been thinking these last few days about defunct magazines---the many absent friends at my mental newsstand. I was going to celebrate each one, but the first ran away with this post. [more]

For days now I've been hearing a familiar old song in my head. Pounding guitar, three young voices in harmony. They're letting it rip---the hope, the exuberance, the conviction that a new age of equality was about to transform their nation and the world. A woman's voice soars above the others. "It's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom!" sings Mary Travers, band mate of Peter and Paul. On Wednesday she died of leukemia, age 72. [more]

If Anne Frank had lived to a wise old age instead of dying at 15 in Bergen Belsen, just weeks before the camp's liberation, she would have turned 80 last month. Her birthday was June 12, her transcendent diary a gift on the day she turned 13. It had a red-checked cover and a tiny metal latch like the ones on girlhood diaries everywhere, my own included. I used to begin every entry "Dear Diana," a homage to Anne's "Dear Kitty." I longed for a friend like Anne---so passionate and searching, yet so deft at sending up adult foibles. [more]

Maria del Carmen Bousada, who has just died of cancer at age 69, leaving two-year-old twin boys, was a woman possessed by a dream: bearing children of her own. Never mind that she had no job or husband when she sold her home at 66 to pay for fertility treatments in California. She once said, "Everyone has to have children at the right time for them. This was the right time for me." [more]

My first locker room, in the basement of Oyster River Junior High School, had beige cinderblock walls and open showers that exposed your cringing, naked pre-teen body for the whole class to see. Oh, the horror! I never guessed that I would come to rely on locker rooms for solace, renewal and that special camaraderie found only where women gather naked---all ages, all sizes---with no expectation but a fleeting escape from the rigors of the day. [more]

The way some people carry on, you'd think old age was the well deserved affliction of the lazy and the clueless. Crow's feet, turkey neck? Get yourself to a surgeon, honey. Aches and pains got you down? Tsk tsk. Guess you've been neglecting yoga. But the fact is that one of two things will happen to us all: we'll die too soon, or we'll grow old. Thank goodness we now have a straight-talking mentor in the unwelcome art of aging---legendary British author Diana Athill, now 91. [more]

Let's hear it for Mother's Day---and I mean that literally. I've gathered a bright but thorny garland of songs to express the many moods of having or being a mother: the starry-eyed admiration of childhood, the guns-blazing rebellion of adolescence, the oceanic missing that follows a mother's death. We've all yearned for a mother who is boundlessly empathic and consoling. But real-world mothers have their quirks and complications, as songwriters have known since the heyday of Anonymous. [more]

If you are or expect to be a grandmother; if you've ever felt a surge of gratitude or a stab of resentment at a grandmother in your child's life; if you treasure the shoes-off, second-cup-of-coffee frankness of women sharing secrets among friends, you owe it to yourself to read Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Share the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother. Full disclosure: I'm one of the writers. [more]